Margaret the Virgin

Margaret the Virgin, known in the Latin West as Saint Margaret of Antioch and in the Greek East as Saint Marina the Great Martyr, is a Christian virgin martyr whose medieval cult was among the most widespread in Europe. According to the received hagiographical tradition she lived in the late third and early fourth centuries and was put to death at Antioch during the persecutions associated with the emperor Diocletian, the year 304 being the date customarily assigned to her martyrdom. Western and Eastern sources do not agree on which Antioch is meant: Latin legendaries often locate her in Antioch of Pisidia in Asia Minor, while many Greek accounts place her at Antioch on the Orontes in Syria. No contemporary historical document attests her existence. Already in 494 Pope Gelasius I listed her Acts among apocryphal writings, and modern historians generally regard the narrative as legendary, assembled from common motifs of the virgin-martyr genre. Her liturgical cult, however, is ancient and is well documented from the early medieval period onward in both East and West.

The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine and the earlier Greek martyrdom of Marina relate that she was the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius (or Aidesios). Her mother died soon after her birth, and the infant was entrusted to a Christian nurse who lived some miles from the city and who raised her in the Christian faith. When her father learned of her conversion he disowned her. Margaret then lived in the countryside keeping sheep with her foster mother, having already consecrated her virginity to God. The Roman prefect Olybrius, in some recensions described as governor of the East, encountered her while she was watching her flock, was struck by her beauty, and sought to make her his wife or concubine on condition that she renounce Christianity. She refused, declaring that she was the handmaid of Christ.

Arrested and brought to trial, she was interrogated and subjected to a succession of tortures intended to force apostasy. The most famous episode of her legend, endlessly depicted in medieval art, concerns her imprisonment. In her cell the devil appeared in the form of a dragon and swallowed her; she made the sign of the cross, the beast burst open, and she emerged unharmed. A second demonic apparition, this time in human shape, she subdued with a scourge or by seizing it by the hair. These wonders converted many onlookers but did not move her judges. After further torments, including scourging, burning with torches, and immersion in water or a cauldron, she was beheaded. The dragon episode, though later critics dismissed it as fabulous, made her a favoured intercessor for women in childbirth, who prayed to pass safely from the womb as Margaret had passed from the belly of the dragon.

Her feast is kept on 20 July in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Western Rite Orthodox calendars, and on 17 July in the Byzantine rite, with additional commemorations in the Coptic calendar. In the high Middle Ages she was numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers, saints invoked especially against epidemic disease and sudden death. She became one of the most frequently chosen titular saints of parish churches in medieval England and on the Continent, and she appears in countless sculptures, wall paintings, and illuminated manuscripts holding a cross or a scourge and standing upon or emerging from a dragon. Joan of Arc named Margaret, together with Saint Catherine and Saint Michael, among the heavenly voices that guided her. Relics have been claimed by various churches, including Montefiascone in Italy, but no burial place can be established with historical certainty.

Although her feast was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 because of the legendary character of her Acts, she remains inscribed in the Roman Martyrology and continues to be venerated in both East and West. She is invoked as patron of pregnant women, of childbirth and of women in labour, of nurses, peasants and exiles, of the dying, of those suffering from kidney disease, of the falsely accused, against sterility, and against demonic assault. The endurance of her cult, despite the absence of verifiable biographical fact, illustrates how powerfully the virgin-martyr ideal and the dragon miracle spoke to medieval and later Christian devotion.